It is quite probable that the following names say little or nothing to the new generations of Spanish readers born in the era of the digital revolution: José Echegaray, Jacinto Benavente, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Vicente Aleixandre, and more than unlikely that they have read something of the work of these writers awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, in the years 1904, 1922, 1956 and 1977 respectively.
Perhaps the other two Spanish writers who have deserved recognition from the Swedish Academy had more luck among young people: Camilo José Cela (1989) and Mario Vargas Llosa (2010), who also has Peruvian nationality. Although perhaps not even they enter the radar of the tablets of the compulsive millennial Internet surfers.
Cela was a cyclone in life, but the years since his death in 2002 have not been kind to him or his work. Unless it is due to a curricular obligation, would a young person read La colmena or Pascual Duarte today for pleasure? As for Vargas Llosa, who at 86 is still in the gap, he most certainly deserves greater recognition, if only for his romantic relationship with Isabel Preysler.
The more than two years of the pandemic have produced a curious paradox in terms of the habits and tastes of readers: the more than welcome increase in book sales does not necessarily reflect a greater approach to universal literature, not to mention the classics among young readers. Of course, the publishing industry is up in smoke, but, unfortunately, it is also up in smoke what they offer in the endless number of novelties that arrive at bookstores, many of them as similar to each other as the movies and series of recent years. It is literature -or cinema- turned into an industry.
Would you risk publishing an editorial today, let's say Cela's Mazurca for two dead? Or Gonzalo Torrente Ballester's La saga/fuga de J.B? At the very least, one suspects that the authors of these novels would, with luck, receive a heartfelt rejection note together with an invitation to send them future manuscripts more in line with the company's editorial policy.
A few years ago, a couple of misguided literature professors sent a few chapters of a novel by Patrick White (1912-1990), the only Australian Nobel laureate to date, to a well-known publisher, with a fictitious sender name. Well, after some time they received as a response not only an explicit note of rejection, but it was accompanied by a series of suggestions so that the anonymous writer could improve the writing, in addition to the recommendation to sign up for a writing workshop. Thus, the Nobel Prize Patrick White.
And it is that in these times in which considerations related to identity, gender, equality, nation or race, among others, without forgetting the author's attitude regarding movements such as the animalist, the environmentalist, the pacifist or the vegan, to name just four, it would seem that any literary expression prior to, let's say, the year 2000, does not deserve to be taken into consideration by the woke generation, because all they see is a bunch of outdated writers racist, sexist, bullies, homophones and who knows what else. In short, authors of books whose only destiny should be to burn in a bonfire in the middle of the squares of our cities.
And in the same way that the cinema, which every day has fewer theaters, succumbs to the rise of platforms or the announced proximity of the bursting onto the scene of the metaverses, literature, the good one, is heading towards a sepulchral irrelevance.
Well, as Don Pío Baroja once said, the important thing is to have a good time, which, well thought out, is a whole philosophy of life. And all the better with a good book always at hand.
